Ah, for the good old days! Hardly a week passed without a tabloid headline heralding the latest in Dead Sea Scroll “discoveries.” Not anything so mundane as the Temple Scroll, or as prosaic as copies of Scripture. No, these were the ipsissima verba (or perhaps the mother lode) of popular culture: references in the scrolls to Elvis; prophecies of the end of the world (in December 1999!) at the hands of a woman, in the aftermath of a flood; vegetarian diets for long, even eternal, life.
For all intents and purposes, the tabloids seem a thing of the past—as, thankfully, are the long lines at the grocery store where I could pursue my scholarly research without having to actually purchase these publications and risk the derisive looks of checkout clerks. The good old days: gone and never to return—or so I thought.
Fortunately (for me at least), happy days are here again. Just think about these headlines: “How Toilet Habits Killed Off the Dead Sea Scrolls Sect”; “Toilets May Be Clues to Texts”; “Toilet Tied to Dead Sea Scrolls”; “Ancient Latrine Fuels Debate at Qumran”; “Latrine Practices Posed Health Risks to Sect”; “Discovery of Latrine Sheds New Light on the Mystery of Dead Sea Scrolls”; “Extreme Latrine”; “At Qumran, Ancient Excrement Fuels Modern Debate.” From eschatological speculation to scatological excavation—it doesn’t get much better than this!
Lest I be accused of (literally) muckraking, I hasten to add that this is but a sampling of news accounts from November 2006 to January 2007, culled from media sources of impeccable pedigree: among them, The Independent (London), The Charlotte Observer, MSNBC.com, The Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, The Houston Chronicle and The Statesman (India). No tabloids here, although even at their height (or depth?), such publications might have eschewed such queries as “Parasites in ancient poop?” (that, compliments of MSNBC.com).
But tabloids were, at least for me, rarely of any interest beyond their outrageous headlines, outlandish illustrations and outright phony stable of academic “experts” and “explorers.” In our instance, of course, there are substantive issues at hand, presented by respected scholars, and reasonably argued with evidence all the way from archaeology to zoology. But would any of this have nearly the impact it has were it not for enticing, if somewhat gross, phrasing devised by clever headline writers trekking through territory generally associated with adolescent males (or perhaps such humor fails to reach even those less-than-lofty levels)?
Not to be outdone, sports writers are also breathing new life into otherwise moribund imagery. How else to explain references to an “offensive playbook that seemed as old as the Dead Sea Scrolls” (The Seattle Times) or the deference shown in the Ottawa Sun to the phrase “‘defense wins championships’ as if it was first written in the Dead Sea Scrolls”?
Oh, at last I understand it: Far from being a sectarian center, a pottery producer, patrician villa or military outpost, Qumran was really a place where guys went to shoot some hoops or relieve themselves!
Ah, for the good old days! Hardly a week passed without a tabloid headline heralding the latest in Dead Sea Scroll “discoveries.” Not anything so mundane as the Temple Scroll, or as prosaic as copies of Scripture. No, these were the ipsissima verba (or perhaps the mother lode) of popular culture: references in the scrolls to Elvis; prophecies of the end of the world (in December 1999!) at the hands of a woman, in the aftermath of a flood; vegetarian diets for long, even eternal, life. For all intents and purposes, the tabloids seem a thing of the past—as, […]
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